Read Up! The Most ELLE-Worthy Stories from 'The Moth'

On the occasion of September's The Moth (Hyperion)—a new collection of 50 winning true stories from the 16-year-old spoken-word series of the same name—editor Catherine Burns has hand picked four of the book's most ELLE-suited tales, all of which are excerpted here.

My story starts in late July in Washington, DC. It was a typical hot summer day. I found myself in the Oval Office by myself, and in walked the President of the United States, William Jefferson Clinton. He said to me, "I hear you want to be my next press secretary." And I said, "Yes sir, I think I do." And it happened. Now, there should have been some warning signs for me.

Some were obvious, like the Lewinsky investigation. But a couple were not so obvious.

The first was, the guy who I was replacing, Mike McCurry, started smiling as soon as he heard I got the job. And for six weeks the smile didn't come off his face.

The second, which was weird, was I was the only applicant for the job. There was no interview process. Nobody else applied. I was the only one in America who seemed to want the job.

But I had this thing about challenging myself personally, and I thought, You know, I can do this, so I'm gonna try to do it.

And I would love to say that I got off to a good start. But I can't.

Just after I started, we went on a trip. We went off to Russia, and then we were going to Ireland, doing big foreign policy stuff. The trip was going pretty well, but the last night, in Moscow, I was coming into the hotel, and I ran into an old friend of mine, the godfather to my daughter, who I hadn't seen in a couple years.

And he said, "Come on, we've gotta go out." And he convinced me, so we went to—I'll never forget—a place called the Hungry Duck. And they were doing things there that I couldn't take my eyes off, so I had to stay till five in the morning.

Which was okay, because we weren't leaving until six.

So I got back to my hotel and made one mistake, which was to sit down on the bed, and I obviously fell asleep.

And I'm telling you, you don't know anxiety until you've woken up as the White House Press Secretary on your first foreign trip, at six-fifteen in Moscow, without a passport, knowing you've missed Air Force One.

The only good thing that I could think of was the day couldn't get worse. I was wrong.

When I finally caught up with the traveling party, I was immediately surrounded by reporters who said, "How do you feel about being the first White House press secretary to ever miss Air Force One on a foreign trip?" And a strange phrase caught in my head, and I couldn't lose it.

About a week earlier, the President had been at a prayer breakfast, talking about his affair with Monica Lewinsky, and he said, "I'm really sorry for what I did. And I'm working very hard to make up for it, particularly to those I've hurt the most."

So when I got the question "How do you feel?" I said, "I'm really sorry for what I've done wrong, and I'm working hard to fix it, particularly to those who I've hurt the most."

Now, mocking the President of the United States when you make a mistake isn't always the best idea, but it came to my head, and I said it.

But the day went on, and we finally had a little break where the President had some private meetings, and I went to the back of the Irish ambassador's residence to go to sleep.

I hadn't been asleep for more than five minutes, and was actually pretty hungover, which is why I needed the sleep, when the President's personal aide came back and said, "The President's in a meeting right now, and he needs you to come into it."

Now, I'm not the smartest guy in the world, but this had practical joke written all over it, and I said, "Get lost."

About three minutes later, he came in again and said, "Hey, the President's in with the band U2, he's with Bono, and they want to talk to you."

I said, "Well, if the President wants to see me, he can walk his presidential ass right back to this room and ask me himself." Well, about sixty seconds later, the presidential ass showed up and said, "What is your problem? These guys want to meet you." So I walked into the meeting, and this guy, this rock star, Bono, comes up and gives me this big hug and says, "I really wanted to meet you." And I said, "Well, that's great, Mr. Bono, but, um, why?" And he said, "Anyone who can handle world affairs, and Monica Lewinsky and all that, and still has time to stay out all night drinking is my kind of guy."

Now, most people would think, you know, Bono, U2, telling you that they like your work, that'd be great. Only problem, I'd spent most of the day making sure the President didn't know I'd missed Air Force One, and Bono busted me.

Andy Christie is creative director of Slim Films, a NYC-based animation and illustration studio. His writing has appeared in The New York Times and in the Thomas Beller anthology Lost and Found: Stories from New York. His autobiographical stories have been heard on The Moth Radio Hour and WFUV's Cityscape. He is also creator and host of a live storytelling series, The Liar Show.

My therapist, Phyllis, is in her chair on the other side of the coffee table, and she's got her shoes off in front of the Saul Steinberg lithograph. Her legs are tucked up underneath her in these kind of billowy, white summery pants, and she's looking at me funny. And I'm on the couch looking back at her funny, because in the middle of the coffee table between a box of tissues and the African primitive carving is a bottle of Maker's Mark bourbon. She's my therapist; she knows what I drink. And next to that is a bottle of Glenfiddich scotch. She's my therapist; I have no idea what she drinks, but I assume this is for her. And she's wearing a little more makeup than usual, you know, enough so that I can notice. And three days ago, the last time I saw her, her hair was brown, and now it's red. She's been messing with it for a while. First kind of light brown combed back and then dark brown with bangs, and every time she shows up with a new do she asks me how the change in her makes me feel, like maybe she's doing it for me. So I spend about twenty dollars' worth of therapy telling her how great she looks, because just in case she is flirting I want her to know that I know.

So now she's a redhead, and there are these bottles and glasses with ice there. And she wants to have a drink with me, right now, in the middle of a session, right here in her office, which is also her living room, which means there is also a bedroom here someplace. I am on the verge of a massive therapeutic breakthrough. After three years sitting here listening to her say "And how do you feel about that?" while I'm trying for one guilt-free second to forget my girlfriend back at home and imagine Phyllis getting up and tiptoeing across the room to squeeze in next to me and ask me, "And how do you feel about this?"—now with the whiskey bottles I feel like it's my move, although I'm not much of a mover. I'm more the shaker type. That's why I'm here. And I have a girlfriend, that's also why I'm here. At the time I was a fifty-three-year-old man who after sixteen years was still calling his girlfriend his girlfriend.

One day my girlfriend and I were home when we had only been living together for about thirteen years. And we're watching TV, and we're talking about our future, when she stops and laughs and says, "Forget it. You'll get married when hell freezes over."

And I stop for a second and think, and say, "I never agreed to that."

And she laughs again because, you know, it's a funny line, and she has a great sense of humor. But after that the conversation kind of fades away and stops. Because it's time to talk, which for me means it's time to talk to a mental health professional, which is when I find Phyllis.

Phyllis is probably about fifty, like I am, because she remembers and forgets a lot of the same things that I do. But she looks a lot younger, and she's tiny and kind of pretty. So she's cute enough to inspire my fantasies and old enough so I don't have to feel like a midlife-crisis cliché. It's the best of both worlds, really. But the attraction isn't really a physical thing. I just think we make kind of a nice couple. Unlike every other therapist whose spirit I've broken, Phyllis always looks happy to see me, and also unlike those others, she has human reactions. She's appalled when I say something appalling, like the time I was in the men's room and a moth flew out of my pants, right out through the fly like it was an empty old purse. And when I say something funny, like the time the moth flew out of my pants, she laughs just like my girlfriend. And because we haven't been living together for sixteen years, she always at least pretends to be listening, and you can't expect that from anyone. So I'm kind of in love with her, which is okay because you're supposed to fall in love with your therapist. And I swore to myself and to my girlfriend that I was gonna do this right this time.

So she started changing her hair, that was the first thing I noticed, and shortly after the hair thing I noticed that she started losing the little midriff belly bulge that she had that you could only see when she wore certain pants. It was like she was working out maybe. Then a little while after that I stopped bumping into her other patients as I was walking in and out of the office. I wasn't avoiding eye contact with Mr. Handsome with a Chiclet-sized cell phone anymore, and that was okay with me. I didn't think he belonged in therapy anyway. After a while it was just Phyllis and the Saul Steinberg lithograph and the African carvings and the shark's teeth and the rain-forest white noise machine. And me. And her place was like my place, like our place, and now she wants to pour cocktails like we're a couple and we just got home from work and have to unwind before dinner.

And she asks if I want a drink, and I say sure, you know, if you're having one. And she says, "I know the whole drink thing is totally unprofessional, but I've been struggling with a way to bring this up." And I know what's coming. I know it's gonna be big, and suddenly I am terrified.

It's like when I took a few flying lessons. I was really into the whole idea of it—the green headphones and the logbook and the flight bag and the shrink-wrapped set of instruction manuals. But I always kind of hoped the lesson would be canceled because of bad weather. You know, give me a license, but keep that plane away from me. So now I am kind of nervous about how she's going to crack open this whole thing that is going on between us.

So I sit back and let her start. She pours the drinks, she looks at me for a while, and she says, "I've been sick. I am in the middle of a course of chemotherapy right now. You must have noticed me losing weight."

And I can't say anything. I am frozen. I am shocked. I am scared, and I'm whatever a bigger word for sad is. And I'm ashamed about what I was expecting to happen, and I can't help it, but I'm disappointed and that makes me ashamed again. And she says she's not saying that we have to stop our work right now, she doesn't want to. Maybe it's selfish, but some work is good for her because it helps her forget and stay centered. But even though the treatment's pretty successful now, things could change anytime without much warning, and I'm the one who has to decide what to do, to stay or go.

I look at her, trying to figure out what to say, still tongue-tied. She says it's up to me, and she hands me a list of other therapists in case I decide that she can't help me anymore.

I say, "When have you ever helped me before?" And she laughs, and it's great because she gets one of those human looks again. I can't believe how much I would miss her if I left. And she looks happy about it when I say, "I'm not going anywhere."

3. From Carly Johnstone's "A Perfect Circle"

In August of 1998 I was trying to give birth, and it was well attended. I had a nurse, two midwives, my boyfriend at the time (who was not the father), my foster brother, and two women who were also awaiting the birth of their first child, who also happened to be my child.

Seven months prior to this, after many glasses of water, visits to the bathroom, and sticks peed upon, I had come to accept the fact that I was pregnant. This was not the best of news for a bunch of reasons. One of them was that I was sixteen. More so than that, my life had been a lesson in negatives. It had been a lesson in what not to do.

My mantra had been "How not to be my mother." My mother was a prostitute, and I had grown up with her, and many other prostitutes, and the men that handled them. When she died in the 1980s, like so many from AIDS, I went into foster care. I did a year and a half there before my mother's parents, my grandparents, took me in under duress. As you might note, people who don't want children probably shouldn't have them. I went from being touched much too much in really painful and monstrous ways, to never being touched at all. Sometimes, I wasn't sure which was worse. They lasted about five years with me before they threw in the towel, retired to Florida, and put me in a Southern Baptist children's home.

I lasted about a year and a half there before I thought, I could do better than this. I could raise myself. I mean, the bar was pretty low. I studied a lot, and I took a lot of tests, and I graduated high school two and a half years early. I got on a Greyhound and went back to New Jersey, because that's where I grew up and that's where I felt safe. And I started college at a local community college. I got my first full-time job with full health benefits, and I got my first place. I was sixteen. And by the end of my sixteenth year, we get to the point with the bathroom and the pee sticks, and a wrench was thrown in the works.

I knew a few things right off the bat: I wasn't going to abort. A lot of people asked me why I wasn't going to abort (a surprising amount of people were willing to ask, "Why don't you abort?"). And it wasn't because of some misbegotten belief in God or because I'm pro-life, because I'm not. It was because I really, really wanted this baby. I desperately wanted this baby; the want was a pain. I had always wanted a baby. I always wanted to be a mother. I always wanted a family. I always wanted something that was mine and pure and good and whole.

I wanted it, but I couldn't keep the promises I had made to myself about having a family. That whole mantra about not being my mom; I couldn't give this kid a home. I couldn't give a life without fear or want. I couldn't promise that I would be there all the time. I couldn't give unfailing support or provide a net. And so I had to find another solution. I looked at traditional adoption, but I couldn't have a kid grow up the way I did, with so many questions about who I was and where I came from. And I looked at fostering, but again, you know, I had traveled that road. It hadn't really gone so well.

Finally, someone explained open adoption. It means that the adoptive parents want an ongoing relationship with the mother; and the mother—she gets to choose the parents. And I thought, I can do this. If he never has questions, if he always knows where he comes from, I can do this.

So I attacked this like I attack everything else in my life, like a research paper. I made a lot of calls and took a lot of notes, and I finally found an agency that could meet my criteria.

I had three. My first was that it had to be a same-sex couple, because, at this time, it was a little harder for them to adopt. Additionally, despite my own sexual ambiguity, I realized that if I ever found anyone to settle down with, it would be another woman. I never wanted that to be an issue.

Number two: they had to not have any extreme religious affiliation. I had had religion shoved down my throat, and I thought faith should be a choice and something questioned. Number three: they had to want an interracial child as their first choice. The father of this baby was black, and I was half very white and half something very brown and short. I wanted this kid to be a first choice. I didn't want it to be something they settled upon because they couldn't find a perfect blond-haired, blue-eyed baby, or because they were trying to better their karma. Even with those narrow parameters, I had over two hundred couples that were viable choices, and each of them had a brochure. Each brochure was full of pictures of their family and friends and their homes, and information about how well educated they were, how much support they had, and how financially stable they were. (If you're ever thinking of adopting, I recommend a background in marketing.)

After going through those, I found about forty or fifty couples that I really liked, and I made a long list of questions. Some of them were what you might expect, like "Why are you adopting?" But a lot of them were a little different, like "How are you going to do this kid's hair?" and "Why don't you believe in God?" and "What do you do when you're mad?"

Eventually I found a couple that I really liked. Their names were Gwen and Gretchen. I did not pick their names, but it's really fucking cute. They lived up in Portland, Maine, which was far enough for me. I didn't want them to be too close, because I totally knew I might be a stalker mom, and I didn't want to find myself on a playground. So they were close enough that I could get there if I needed to, but also far enough away that I couldn't run there in ten minutes.

They came down from Maine to meet me. Gretchen is tall and strong and unflappable, and Gweny is tiny and sweet and nurturing. And I liked them, and they liked me, which was really important because they had to deal with me for a really long time, and a lot of people had not really hung in there.

I knew they were the right ones. I knew that they would work. I chose them, and they gave me an 800 number so I could always reach them. And we waited the wait of expectant parents, and I got bigger.

Eventually we found ourselves in this delivery room, and after twenty-three hours of back labor, I gave birth to an eight-pound, six-ounce baby boy.

And he was perfect. And he was whole. And he was so beautiful, and he had all of his fingers and toes.

I had forty-eight hours with him, and I sang him every song I knew. I tried to say hello to him, and I tried to say good-bye to him. And at the end of that forty-eight hours, I brought him downstairs, and I helped them strap him into a car seat, and I watched these strangers drive away with my baby.

Dr. George Lombardi is a lifelong New Yorker and a graduate of City College of New York and New York University School of Medicine. He is in private practice in New York and his practice consists of saints and sinners. He has two sons, of whom he is enormously proud, and a fabulous Czech girlfriend. He credits his love of stories to his father, who raised his gift for lamentation to an art form

It was a Saturday afternoon in September 1989, and I was home alone unpacking boxes when the phone rang, and a woman that I did not know started to interrogate me.

"Are you Dr. Lombardi? Are you Dr. George Lombardi? Are you an infectious disease specialist? Did you live and work and do research in East Africa? Are you considered to be an expert in tropical infections? Would you consider yourself to be an expert in viral hemorrhagic fevers?"

At this point I paused, gathered myself, and asked the obvious question, "Who are you?"

She introduced herself and said she was the representative of a world figure and Nobel laureate, someone who was suspected of having a viral hemorrhagic fever, and she was calling to ask if I would consult on the case.

Now I found this highly improbable. I was thirty-two years old. I had just opened my office. The phone never rang. I had no patients. In fact I remember staring at the phone trying to will it to ring. But she persisted, and she mentioned that she had gotten my name from a colleague of mine who had told her to "call Dr. Lombardi. He knows a lot about very weird things." She arranged a conference call, and in ten minutes I was transported through the telephone wires to a small hospital in Calcutta, India, where I found out for the first time that the patient was Mother Teresa.

On the line were her two main Indian doctors. We chatted and discussed the details of the case for about an hour, and though those details are now hazy to me, what came through the staticky wires was their deep abiding concern for their patient—these guys were worried.

I wished them well as I got off the line, and I went back to unpack some boxes. She called again an hour later. She said, "They were very impressed by what you had to say, and they'd like you to go to Calcutta. I'm making the arrangements. I can get you out tomorrow afternoon on the Concorde for the first leg."

I said, "This is impossible," as I had just found my passport in one of these boxes, and I told her it expired three months before.

She said, "That's a minor detail. Meet me in front of your building tomorrow morning, Sunday, at 7 a.m."

Well as you can probably surmise, I'm somebody who pretty much does what he's told. So seven o'clock the next morning she comes careening down the block in a wood-paneled station wagon with bad shock absorbers. I jump in. The next stop's the passport office at Rockefeller Center, where on a Sunday morning a State Department official came, let us in, took my picture, and in fifteen minutes handed me a brand new passport. The next stop was the Indian Consulate, where, again on a Sunday morning, the entire staff came in full dress uniform to give me an honor guard procession, which I walked past as they ushered me in to the consulate general himself, who affixed the visa to my passport.

He leaned in towards me and said, "We bestow our blessings on you. The eyes of the world are upon you."

Now I knew who Mother Teresa was, of course, but this was the first moment I realized what she meant, not just to the Indian people, but to the world.

I get back in the car. I'm getting into this.

"Where next?"

She says, "We're ahead of schedule. I'm going to drop you off at your home; I'll be back at 11 a.m. I'll meet you downstairs." Sure enough, 11 a.m., tires squealing, she pulls up with one addition: in the backseat of this station wagon are wedged five Sisters of Charity—five nuns—as if sitting on a perch. They start handing me letters in envelopes and small packages wrapped in burlap and tied with twine, saying, "Well if you see Sister Narita and Sister Rafael, please give them this from me." I'm a courier. This is all before Homeland Security.

We barrel off to JFK, and when we get there I ask, sotto voce, "Why are they here? They could have just given you these things. I don't understand why they had to come to the airport."

And I was told, "Well, I didn't know how to tell you this, but you don't have a confirmed seat on the Concorde—you're flying standby." My eyes widened. "Well, the sisters are going to go up and down the line of ticketed passengers and beg until someone gives up their seat." I stood off to the side, just out of earshot, as I watched the scene unfold.

The five nuns surround this first New York City businessman. He's listening to them, he's looking over at me, he's looking back at them, he shakes his head no, he's sorry, he can't help. They move on to the next one. And now I can hear their voices, which obviously have been raised, and in about fifteen seconds this businessman realizes that resistance is futile, and he hands over his ticket. The sisters come towards me, and they hand me this ticket as an offering, and there is a small triumphal grin on each of their faces—the nun equivalent of a high five.

I wag my finger at them. I say, "You sisters are little devils! I'm going to tell Mother Teresa what you just did!" And they laugh, and that breaks the tension.

Next stop Calcutta, after twenty-four hours in flight. One hundred degrees, one hundred percent humidity. I get off the plane, and I'm met by my own personal private security detail of nuns. They whisk me through customs and deliver me directly to the hospital where the doctors are waiting for me, and the doctors intone, "She's deteriorating."

I go directly to her room. I'm meeting Mother Teresa for the first time. She's clearly very weak, and she beckons me towards her, and I feel as if I'm about to get a blessing.

She says the following: "Thank you for coming. I will never leave Calcutta. Do not ever disagree with my Indian doctors. I need them. They run my hospitals and clinics, and I will not have them embarrassed." And with that she dismisses me with a wave of her hand.

I go and wash my hands, and I come back to examine her. As I go to pull her gown down to listen to her heart and lungs, the nuns who surround her lift the gown up. I pull the gown down; they pull the gown up. This Kabuki dance goes on for several minutes until, from sheer exhaustion, I just banish them from the room. After I perform my examination, I still don't know what's wrong with her. So I do what an infectious disease doctor does: I do my cultures and my Gram stains and my buffy coat smears and my Tzanck prep. And we agree we'll meet the next morning at 9 a.m.

As I leave the hospital, I set upon five thousand pilgrims who are holding a candlelit prayer vigil. I escape back to the hotel, where I pour myself a stiff drink, order room service for dinner, and turn on the local news hoping it will serve as a distraction.

And there I am.

The lead story on the evening news, that night and every night, footage of "Dr. Lombardi entering and leaving the hospital," with the reporters saying, "Dr. Lombardi's come from the United States to attend to Mother Teresa as she inches closer towards death." The drumbeat of the death watch had begun.